Reviews

You play the role of monster hunters, split into two opposing teams, trekking through a treacherous dungeon seeking to best the beast that lurks within, with the winners being the group that kills the creature first. In order to do that though, you’ll need to make it all the way through while avoiding the traps set by the opponents, because if triggered they will halt your progress. But what kind of traps?

Playing this game, you’ll become detectives in Antares National Investigation Agency and across five cases you will attempt to get to the bottom of several interlinked crimes through the use of deduction and decision making, all the while being mindful over that most valuable resource of all; time.

You all play as Summoners who have discovered a magic rich island and you all want the tasty energy goodness for yourself (like evil wizard oil barons). You must fight off the beasties summoned by the other players if you want to win, with the goal being the first player to gain thirty five Summoner points, or have the most points after nine rounds. That player is crowned the Super Summoner! Or winner, for short.

Azulis short for 'azulejos' which is the term used to describe tile work of a style popularised in Spain and Portugal. It might not surprise you then to learn that this game is a tile collecting game, which sets each player the goal of trying to lay out a wall of beautiful tiles in order to score points by their strategic placement. DIY just got a whole lot more fun!

This game seeps theme like no other title released in the last few years. It's a game of nostalgia for everyone who grew up watching Knightmare or playing Heroquest on the kitchen table. Every picture and every bit of text builds on the dark fantasy theme.

There are literally thousands of games out there, but when it comes to two players, not only must it be perfectly balanced and also fun to play, but it has to cater to your personal preferences more so than usual, because if you aren’t enjoying it, well, that’s half the games audience lost. Knowing how difficult a task it is then, how will this, one of the latest entries into the crowded market fare against so much competition?

It's true that most board games are not perfect, and this is fine; either because they achieve what they set out to do and correcting them either ruins the objective or experience, or because the game is great and minor mechanical foibles don't overall mar its brilliance. Here is our review of flawed, fun Fear.

One thing I absolutely adore about board gaming is the far reaches of nonsense it will go to in order to create an experience. Fabled Fruit has you concocting smoothies for the various creatures in the animal world. Rampage has you physically destroying the board you set up at the beginning. In case you hadn't seen where this is going in this review of Magic Maze, believe it or not, this game is the latest to serve up strangeness in a box.

The premise is simple; you are a contestant on a TV show, set on a desert island, and to win the prize of a million dollars you must be the first to escape the island by raft, but you must keep yourself fed along the way or you'll 'die' of starvation.

While games like Rising Sun, Kingdom Death Monster and Star Wars Destiny/X-Wing focus so much on the luxury nature of gaming, Inis takes the approach thaf often the best things are borne from simple backgrounds.

Let's not forget that Arkham Horror was one of the original Lovecraftian board games to ever exist, so if anybody deserved the right to give this theme another shot, it was these guys. Enter Arkham Horror: The Card Game, a cooperative scenario and campaign based series of adventures, featuring elements of deck building and action selection. Is it any good though? Or to put it other terms; did we go mad for it?

Have you played The Manhattan Project? In case you haven't, it's a fantastic worker placement game by Minion Games about the arms race to build nuclear weapons; a terrifying theme for a great game. It's reasonably heavy and can take a couple of hours to play, which may be off putting to some. Well, fret not, for now you can have all that bomb building fun at a fraction of the play time!

Did you ever watch the film 'The Pursuit Of Happyness' starring a down on his luck Will Smith and his adorable son Jaden? If you're like me you probably came out of the cinema feeling like you've been put through the wringer. Thankfully, this film was not the basis for the board game I'm about to review.

It appears that in concocting this, Alexander Pfister grabbed his largest mixing bowl, threw in all of the euro mechanic ingredients he found in his fridge, adding a cup of hand management, a sprinkle of deck building, a splash of tile placement and a pinch of worker placement, yet instead of opening the oven an hour later and finding a heaving, steaming mess, Alexander has baked one hell of a good flan.

The challenges are varied and feel like a board game version of 'Dr Kawashima's Brain Training' with some cards involving working out which word is written in the colour of itself (e.g. 'red' written with red ink), others involving memory and some having you dextrously placing fingers on your own face.

Scythe has been a much talked about game for the past year. I remember seeing a lone test copy of it being fawned over at the Spiel event in October, so it's nice to see that it's finally arriving in the hands of the people who backed it. However, does it deliver a fresh experience?

If you’re looking for a physical game that’s as fun and wildly entertaining as the best party games, then you’d be a fool not to pick this up. I’ll also be adopting the happy salmon greeting into my repertoire from now on too.

Did you ever have a Tamagotchi? Ah the good old days of poop, hunger and hatred. I once threw a Tamagotchi out of a second story window for beeping constantly at three in the morning after the little poop machine had managed to fill the screen with digital excrement and wouldn't shut up about it.

For Chits & Giggles

Detective Club is the latest attempt to make a game around ambiguous art! What makes this different than the others, is that the one who knows nothing (the conspirator) has an actual chance to learn the link between the cards as the game progresses. The chosen one is going to pick two cards of theirs that link to a clue of their choosing, play one for everyone to see, then gives everybody except one person the right clue. In turn the other players will now play a card linking to that clue. Of course, the conspirator only has the cards to go off, but as more are played they will inevitably gain more clues. It was actually much more fun for me than Dixit or Mysterium was, and the cards were beautiful (though Dixit's are too) 🔍🔎 #boardgames #boardgame #instaboardgame #photography #games #tabletop #fun #instafun #tabletopgames #tabletopgaming #geek #gaming #hobby #colour #boardgamegeek #bgg #spieldesjahres #spiel #essen #essenspiel2018 #spiel2018 #detectiveclub #i❤️games

Planet was a game that I observed (but didn't play!) at the Tabletop Gaming Live show, and saw again (but didn't play!) at Spiel, and so finally I managed to properly check it out at a local gaming meetup. It's fun, and a cute theme, though very luck dependent where you end up stumbling onto attracting a creature over planning for it. Would play again though take it as a fun diversion over a full strategy. The components are incredibly unique and as one of the other players put it "The best use of a D12 I've seen" 🤣
#boardgames #boardgame #instaboardgame #photography #games #tabletop #fun #instafun #tabletopgames #tabletopgaming #geek #gaming #hobby #colour #boardgamegeek #bgg #spieldesjahres #spiel #planet

Russ repping one of the biggest and best board game cafes out there with his @snakesandlattes shirt, kindly donated by their lovely staff at the College branch! Not only giving him great coffee during Spiel but being super nice guys too! 👌
#boardgames #boardgame #instaboardgame #photography #games #tabletop #fun #instafun #tabletopgames #tabletopgaming #geek #gaming #hobby #colour #boardgamegeek #bgg #spieldesjahres #spiel #snakesandlattescollege #snakesandlattes #fashion